Miners and their hashrate simply aren’t the whole network no matter how many times you repeat it. Nodes VERIFY those transactions and blocks that miners make. If nodes no longer verify your blocks, you don’t get paid, plain and simple.
There will always be others around ready to mine if we have to leave behind the big miners like Jihan today. GPUs sound silly for the purpose of mining bitcoin right now, but if suddenly ASICs no longer work, they’ll be the big earners again (at least after a difficulty drop) and half the planet already has one or more at home right now.
It would suck getting slow blocks for a few days until the diff drop, sure, but then bitcoin’s mining would go from 9 big players to a million, helping to deliver Satoshi’s vision of decentralization in a way we never could with ASICs.
So your concern that “non-mining full nodes running code to orphan ghash blocks will be redundant as all the mining nodes have been “captured”!” is silly. There’s always more mining power out there because the incentive exists for it to exist and the true-believers are not insignificant.
If and when Bitcoin’s developers decide to “HF and create an ASIC resistant PoW” is, like I said before, totally an emergency-only decision that would have to have tons of support. There couldn’t possibly be a campaign to convince others to do such a thing; others would be breaking down their door begging for that fix asap!
Also, keep in mind that in 2013 such an emergency hard fork was done already. If you want to call it “forking to an alt coin” then fine, but then we’re all on an altcoin now because the blockchain Satoshi created actually has Trillions of bitcoins on it right now and has been happily discarded by just about everyone on the planet.
What matters is the BRAND of Bitcoin, and by extension, the development team that the brand flows from. BTC1, like Bcash, BitcoinXT, Classic, and BU before it, are all a different brand (altcoins) because the Bitcoin developers, who run the coin from Githubs Bitcoin/Bitcoin directory, have the repository where Bitcoin exists and updates are downloaded from. They control the source code, just like the singular dev teams for every open source project.
I know you’ve been told countless times that Bitcoin is just an idea and any dev team can create it, but that narrative is well-proven to be false by the countless linux distros and other open-source projects that always find it necessary to give new BRANDS to their forks for practical reasons.
People who don’t understand the technology of open source development keep getting this wrong and telling lies because they simply don’t get it.
Roger and Jihan have both admitted to not understanding this technology and culture, but still say it doesn’t matter.
I guess they’ll have to find out the hard way. Will you?
